Chapter Four

It turns out I had finished Chapter four. I was happy enough with the way it turned out, so I present it now with only a few minor changes. Any and all comments appreciated.

Chapter Four: The Warmth of the Sun
-Luke

Erased.

Just like that, gone.

A little girl’s life snuffed out like a sandcastle on the shore, washed away as if it were nothing, meaningless. I ran through the night in torment, gasping for breath. The arrow wound in my shoulder seemed to cry like a living thing, sending shivers down my spine that were chased by long rivulets of blood. Poison, I realized quickly, my soldier’s mind neatly tucking the fact away even as everything in me wanted to drop to my knees in heartache and wait for death.

I’d failed.

An oath had been broken tonight even as an oath of vengeance had been born. I’d sworn to protect my brother and sister with my life, and I’d failed them. Injured, increasingly dizzy, and out of breath, I knew I had to think of something fast, or I was going to die. Men would be after me, were already after me. With dogs, and horses. I could outrun neither.

Maps flitted through my mind one by one as I deliberated briefly over what to do. There was a creek that flowed not far from here. If I could throw off the dogs and disguise my trail, it would buy me a little bit of time. I cut south, and increased my speed as much as I could manage.

The stream would save me. It was a slender offshoot of the Tarnle, a mighty river that ran south all the way to the Void. I all but crashed into the water when I finally made it, exhausted and sick. Every bone in my body trembled, every muscle ached. The heavy sedative at work in my system waged war with the shockingly icy water. It was all I could do it crawl through the smooth pebbles to the other side and collapse.

The need to sleep grew even stronger, making my limbs heavy. I staggered to a kneeling position and began to rip off my shirt with heavy, clumsy fingers. I slapped at my newly numbed arrow wound awkwardly, feeling for the tip still embedded in my flesh. As soon as my fingers were able to find purchase, I pulled. It did not come out easily. I bit my lip till it bled to keep from screaming. And finally, after ripping open the skin anew I was able to remove the cursed devil.

And then I collapsed again, and would surely have died, had the arrow not wound up beneath my tangled limbs, where it was able to dig slightly into my chest. I came to again, wrapping the tattered remains of my shirt around my shoulder in the best bandage I could muster. The forest spread before me. I wanted to get up and walk, where I could hide in its shelter, but I could only crawl. I made it no more than a few trees in before the sedative at last had its way with me, and I collapsed into a deep sleep. My last thought before I fell unconscious was that I had gone nowhere near far enough to escape.

---

Every time I slept for the last three years I had been afflicted with painful nightmares of death, my own. I always dreamed when I slept, and that horrible morning in the forest was no exception to that. But like my last nightmare, it was different.

I did not see myself dying, I instead saw myself standing before the Void, a massive wall of nothingness that traverses the curve of the entire planet, separating the world into two halves that do not meet. All was silent, I could see grass waving in a breeze, but I felt nothing. All was reduced to pallid gray monochrome, as if all color had been drained from the world. I felt as I stood there a sense of waiting, as if someone important were about to speak.

And then after a moment, everything changed, another gray image filling my head. A tall man with a face like an owl stood covered in blood, with an oddly shaped left arm that bent in an odd way, held to far from the body. And then another change. This time a strikingly beautiful sorceress lay in a deep bed of flowers, the gray color preventing me from seeing what sort of mage she was. Then another shift, another new picture. This time I was flying on the back of a long, skinny dragon. We seemed to be performing in some sort of circus.

Suddenly the images began to swing by faster and faster, more and more disorienting. I saw a war-torn field wet with blood, scattered bodies everywhere. A breathtaking tower the height of a mountain. A mighty three masted ship being hauled over mountains of ice, the Castle of Tarn in ruins, and finally a pit in the midst of a desert, a massive pit yawning wide to swallow me whole…

I woke up in a cold sweat yet again.

Bound.

An enchantment seemed to lay heavily on the forest, making it seem as if I dreamed still. The air all about me had a shimmering quality to it, and my eyelids felt as heavy as anvils as I forced them open. The sedative seemed to be gone, but my body moved sluggishly, as if trapped in molasses. Scattered sunlight peeked through the trees, indicating I had slept far too long.

Long enough to be captured, long enough to be killed.

I could tell that somehow I was being kept safe, through unnatural means.

Through magic.

I lay alone slumped near the roots of an ancient Beech tree. As I began to rise, the world around me moved in a blur, shapes and colors flying by too fast to be seen. I could hear voices calling out, I heard my name, and even saw people walk right past me, with dogs. Yet I was not spotted. No one hauled me to my feet for a quick and brutal execution. I was left alone.

Impossible.

After a time, the world around me seemed to slow, and the blur faded, leaving me laying in the forest alone and free. I could move again, no longer slow and out of synchronization with the world.

Could it really have been magic? I thought as I stood. I didn’t know how, or what had just happened, but I knew some sort of being had just saved me. I stood, alert. All traces of the sedative were indeed gone. My shoulder was sore but otherwise ok, the bleeding seeming to be under control. I couldn’t believe it, there was no way anybody had that kind of luck.

And who would help a murderer escape anyways? The thought troubled me. Who or what had helped me escape from notice?

I sighed, wondering what I should do next. I had to look at the facts. I was a hunted man, wanted for murder. The Knights of Tarn have long had a traditional means of hunting down known killers. A group of six men called an execution force would be deployed immediately. They would hunt me wherever necessary by any means necessary until they killed me. And obviously, I could not count on some manner of strange magic to save me every time they came near.

I decided I would head to the capital for now, try to learn what I could. Perhaps this killer had a pattern, a record, anything that would be the talk of a big city.

For it was not evading capture that concerned me, that was secondary. My own life was secondary, for I had given myself up for dead.

First and foremost, I had one goal, one desire.

I would find my sister’s killer, and I would destroy him.

---

Setting out from the forest wound up being far easier said than done for two reasons.

The first was that I could not forgive myself. Grief continued to plague me as I wearily wandered through the woods. Tears streamed down my cheeks even as I forced myself to carry on. I had been trained all my life not to show emotion. I had learned as a child how to bury my feelings, or snuff them out completely. It was what I had done all day, but the same thoughts continued to haunt me, over and over again. Lorelei’s face as the life left her filled my vision, again and again my failure came back to me.

The second? I was lost.

My normally flawless internal sense of direction failed me, leaving me unable to find any kind of path or way out. The trees grew close together here, weaving together with the undergrowth to create a disorienting green maze that would not yield an exit to me. Worse, it appeared to be growing darker in a matter of mere minutes, meaning that soon I would be stranded by the sun and left to stumble around helplessly.

Finally as twilight fell, bathing the world in orange and pink, I fell to my knees in despair. As I knelt sobbing in the grass of a small clearing, a rustling in the nearby bushes set my senses on alert. I quickly hopped to my feet and drew my sword, taking a ready fighting stance.

An eerie sense of dread settled on me as I waited for something to emerge. A deep, terrifying sense that I was in the presence of something truly malevolent was overwhelming me. My knees wanted to buckle and my head to swim with fear but I forced it all down and stood resolute, ignoring the frosty chill that filled the air, able to focus again at last.

Lorelei’s killer is here, I realized quickly. This was the murderer I sought to kill. Without knowing how I knew, I knew. Not giving it a second thought, I crashed through the bushes into another clearing. A shadow in the shape of a man stood at the far edge. With a wordless scream, I swung my sword up to thrust and lunged forward, but I flew right through the shadow and somehow impossibly emerged where I’d been before, the first meadow.

Turning I dashed back, and there the shadow was again, waiting. The shadow man beckoned me with one hand, mockingly.

He’s toying with me. Whoever this being was, I wasn’t strong enough to defeat him, that much was certain. I couldn’t understand why he was letting me live, even helping me, but I would destroy him all the same, somehow I would become powerful enough.

Knowing it was futile, but unable to suffer the disgrace, I lifted my sword and charged again, giving vent to my frustration and impotence… and emerged outside the forest, stumbling over my boots into direct sunlight.

He was gone again. In my weakness I had failed, but I refused to despair. My head was clear, my emotions controlled. And yet somehow, despite the warmth of the sun, a chill rolled down my spine, and the air outside the forest was still cold.